This November I’ll be trying to write an entire novel* in a month. Along with about 100,000 other writers and would-be writers, I’m participating in the NaNoWriMo this year.

The National Novel Writing Month is a world-wide event created to stimulate writers by giving them a reason to do something very unreasonable: focus on word production only for an entire month. The objective is to start on November 1st with 0 words written of a new novel, and end on November 30th with at least 50,000 words in the manuscript. The NaNoWriMo website provides functionality to count the manuscript, and if it indeed contains 50,000 words by November’s end, I’ll earn the inalienable right to call myself a 2007 NaNoWriMo winner (and absolutely nothing else).

What better opportunity to see if I can write something longer than 11,600 words**? I’ve decided to enter this experiment with a novelization of my short story Prisoner of war (currently at Weird Tales), both because I really like that story and because my wife loves it and wants to read more about the characters and their predicament.

My production schedule demands I write 1,100 words every evening, and 3,300 words on Wednesdays and weekend days. Follow my progress on my NaNoWriMo profile and wish me luck!

* Or at least the first draft of half a novel.
** The word count of my longest story, ‘Queen of diamonds’***.
*** Which, by a strange coincidence, is also the story with the most rejections.